12

 

When winter digs its heels in good and steady, the people of Seattle can get a little cranky. It’s cold and gray, and the days don’t seem to be in any hurry to get any longer. In lots of places, people make the joke “If you don’t like the weather here, just wait a minute, and it’ll change.” In Seattle, the joke goes, “That’s right—it’ll stop raining, and start pouring.” After a while, the gloom really wears people down pretty good.

Edith seemed a little more off her feed than usual, as well, although it took a while for me to realize that it was something other than the weather. Something seemed to be going on with her that I couldn’t put my finger on. She was peeing a lot more lately—a whole lot more—and it seemed like no matter how much food I was pumping into her she couldn’t keep her weight up. Her ornery side kept me from taking her to the hospital for tests, and I couldn’t force her. Or I wouldn’t try, I should say.

Again, I had learned to keep a balance between doing what I thought was best for her, and giving her enough say in the day-to-day decisions about her life that she could maintain her dignity and respect.

She did, finally, agree to go for the tests. I got to work extra early that day to get everything done, because I had a feeling the day was going to be a long one. It sure started out with all the signs of that.

“Morning, Edith. How are you doing this morning?”

“If they paid a person to pee I’d be a rich woman.”

“I brought you some socks.”

“I don’t want ’em. Leave me alone.”

“Aren’t your feet cold?”

“If my feet were cold I’d put socks on, wouldn’t I.”

It was one of those conversations that I knew would have gone a whole lot differently a year earlier. I felt the need to convince her to put her socks on, to take charge the way you would with your kids. But I had come to understand that the chance of her dying from cold feet was pretty slim, but the chance of her blowing her top because someone was trying to tell her whether to put on socks was pretty high. I put the socks on the stairs going up, and asked her if she was ready to get the show on the road.

“Why the hell are we going to the doctors,” she said, not as a question as much as a challenge.

“You agreed,” I reminded her. It had been a rough couple of weeks. No matter what I fed her, she lost more weight. I bought some cans of Ensure, which was supposed to give her all the nutrition she needed. And I felt like between the Ensure, and all the fatty foods I could get her to eat, and the gallons of water she was drinking every day, that the whole day was about Incoming and Outgoing. The more I pumped into her, the more she was on that commode. She was complaining that her butt was sore from sitting on the thing so often.

But even through all that, I was having a terrible time convincing her to go to the doctor’s. She didn’t like the hospital in Ballard, so I had made appointments for her to go to the big Harborview Medical Center down in the First Hill area just outside Seattle—Pill Hill, everybody calls it. When we did start driving, she kept squirming and fussing around in her seat, like a child on the way to school who’s afraid there’s going to be a pop quiz. Sure enough, as we turned off the interstate just a few blocks from the hospital, she announced, “I’m not going. Take me home. I’m not going.”

I let out a sigh.

“Edith, we talked about this,” I said, halfheartedly, knowing how unlikely it was that I was going to get her to budge.

“And when we talked about it I said I didn’t want to go, and I meant it. Now turn this vehicle around, please.”

I argued with her for a few more minutes, but I knew it was no use. I guess there was a part of me that knew it wasn’t my place to push her. She didn’t trust doctors, so pretty often when they would tell her something—to go on a new drug, or whatever—she’d say no, I’m not doing it. But I’d take in the information, and at a calmer moment I’d go through it with her. Sometimes I could convince her. Sometimes I couldn’t. But I also knew that I had to make sure it was for her own good, not for mine, that I was talking her into stuff. This certainly was a borderline case: Did I want her to take the tests today because I knew she needed them, or because I’d driven all the way down here and didn’t want to waste my time?

Fair question. I didn’t really have to answer it, though, because she wasn’t changing her mind either way.

I had to take a couple of right turns to find my way back to the highway, and they happened to take us right past the entrance to the hospital. It was a big, imposing building—two buildings, really, across the street from each other, identical in architecture but one about three times taller than the other. As we headed past them toward the highway, I asked one more time, “Are you sure you don’t want to just go in as long as we’re here?”

“I’m sure I don’t want to go in as long as we’re here,” Edith replied. And that was about that.

In the weeks that followed, I regretted that I hadn’t pushed harder for her to go to the hospital. Things were getting worse. Edith seemed more fragile every day. And it wasn’t just her health. She couldn’t get around very much at all on her own. That was bad enough, but when she finally had to admit that she couldn’t write at all anymore, she got really upset. I realized that I still didn’t know exactly what she was working on, and felt embarrassed that I hadn’t asked. Maybe it was another novel or something. Whatever it was, I knew it was important to her and boosted her spirits, so one afternoon I asked her if I could bring Kelsey over and Edith could dictate whatever she was working on. Edith very politely said thanks, but that wasn’t at all how she worked, and it would never do. I looked over at that big doorstop of a book on her desk, Where Yesterday Began, by Domilini—Edith’s pen name—and felt a wave of sadness. Now that Edith couldn’t write, it was almost as though Domilini had died or disappeared or something.

I came over to fix dinner that night, and was kind of stunned to see her curled up on the corner of the couch, her face red and splotchy like she’d been crying, her cheeks still wet. There was a book on the floor next to her.

“Drop your book, Edith?” I said, stooping to pick it up.

“Don’t bother! I can’t read anymore, God damn it!”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t know,” she went on. “This is terrible. I can’t believe it. You have no idea what this is like. What the hell is a life without reading, or writing? It’s a concentration camp, that’s what it is! Damn it all to hell!”

Now the tears were flowing. She wasn’t sobbing, but the tears were running down her cheeks and onto her lips. I tried to hand her the tissue box, but she swatted it out of my hand. It landed on the rug and skittered into the corner, like it was afraid of her.

She wriggled her way along the couch, then stood up on her own for what seemed like the first time in weeks. She hadn’t been upstairs since the time she fell and broke a rib, more than a year ago, but she was clearly headed that way.

I asked her where she was going.

“I’m going to get my gun,” she said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, as though she was going to put on a pot for tea. “I’m going to shoot myself.”

She was crawling, now, toward the stairway, and had managed to pull herself up so that her torso was on the first step and the rest of her was sprawled down on the floor. She was struggling to get her knee up to join her hands.

Edith did actually have an ancient little .22 pistol in her bedroom. Or I should say, used to have a pistol. I’d already found it and gotten it out of there. There’s no point in having a gun around if you don’t have to.

I didn’t tell her that, though. There didn’t seem any point in that, either. I guess she had the gun for protection, and even though she’d never be able to get to it if she needed to, believing it was there probably made her feel a little more comfortable, and I suppose there was no harm in that.

Edith was cursing a blue streak, and still had only made it up two steps to the landing where the stairs made a left-hand turn. I didn’t try to stop her, but I didn’t go to help her, either. Whatever was happening in this moment, I needed to let it happen. There was nothing I could do to make Edith feel better, and nothing I could do that wouldn’t make her feel worse. I just had to sit there and watch this old woman struggling to get up a flight of stairs that she couldn’t climb, to find a gun that wasn’t there.

Edith had made it to the third step when she gave up. She was crying again, but seemed as mad as she was unhappy. A terrible thought flashed through my mind: I realized that I could, in fact, let her have the gun and do what she wanted. There’s no future for her, she’s in such torment, and why shouldn’t a person have the right to decide what day they cross over to the other side? When did we all get together and decide that no one gets to make that choice?

It was a horrible thought, and before it became too graphic and real for me I pushed it out of my mind, and turned my attention back to the moment, to Edith, crying on the stairs. I got up and walked over to her, and sat down on the steps, and gave her a hug.

“C’mon, let’s go back downstairs,” I said.

Edith didn’t say anything, but she let me help her up and back onto the couch. I found the frightened little box of tissues and put it back on the coffee table. I was making my way to the kitchen when I stopped and turned to Edith, because I thought she might want to talk, but she just sat there, staring at the TV but not seeing it. I realized that there was, really, nothing for either of us to say.

*   *   *

It was about a week before I broached the subject again of going to the hospital for all the tests she’d been avoiding. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but I knew something was up. No one could eat as much as I was feeding that woman and keep losing weight. There were no really bad symptoms, outside of a pretty frequent tummyache and the fact that she was peeing fifty times a day, but clearly something was out of whack.

Edith finally agreed to another trip up to Pill Hill. She was feeling so weak, and had been saying she wanted to go back into physical rehabilitation, thinking it might help her get her strength back, and I realized there was my in. I couldn’t talk her into doing things if she didn’t want to; but if I could start from Point A of what she wanted to do, I could get to Point B of what I thought she needed to do.

I reminded her that if she’d go to the hospital and submit to the X-ray and MRI and whatnot, that the doctor could prescribe rehab, and then Medicare would pay for it. That did the trick. She told me to go ahead and schedule it.

I called up and got an appointment for the following Monday. I wanted to do this soon, before Edith had a chance to change her mind.

I told her that I thought she’d better go in an ambulance this time, since it was getting so hard for her to get around. Truth is, I figured if she was in an ambulance it would be harder for her to change her mind when she got a block away from the place. It worked.

Monday came, and when I finished up at the construction site I drove to the hospital. There was a bicycle rack out front, packed to the gills with bikes, and I wondered, who the heck rides their bike to go to the hospital? But of course the bikes must have belonged to staff members, and they put the rack right out front there to show how environmentally conscious they were. People in Seattle are like that.

My next thought, funnily enough, was of Edith riding a bicycle. I tried to imagine her as a young woman. She must have ridden a bicycle; didn’t everyone back in those days? Or is that just some image you have from old postcards? I thought of her riding a bicycle in Paris, or in Germany. I tried to picture her the way she was in that photo with the clarinet, riding her bike over to her cousin Benny Goodman’s house. In my imagination her hair was long and blowing in the breeze, and she was smiling, without a care in the world.

The sun was just going down as I walked toward the big curved metal awning of the hospital entrance; it was still getting pretty chilly in the evenings, and I could see my breath in front of me as I passed a little clutch of men in coats and blue hospital pants, smoking off to the side, a respectable distance from the automatic doors. I had to stop and wait for the doors to slide open, and then stand aside as another man in a coat and hospital blues wheeled an old man out toward a waiting car. My feet felt heavy, all of a sudden. I realized that in all the effort it had taken to get Edith here, I hadn’t thought much about what they might find out. Now that I was about to learn what it was, I wasn’t at all sure I was ready for it. But it was silly to just stand there, and as soon as the man in the wheelchair passed, I walked on in.

It was like a furnace inside the hospital, and the heat made me feel even more tired than I already was. I shook it off, though, and found the information desk, where they told me Edith had been admitted to stay overnight. I don’t know why I was surprised by that, but I guess I hadn’t thought that part through either. I headed for her room.

When I got off the elevator, I saw the nurses’ station right down the hallway, so I figured I’d check in there first. As soon as I told the nurse who I was, I could see her stiffen up a bit. I knew something was up.

“It’s not good,” she told me straight out. “She has pancreatic cancer.”

Just like that.

I guess it was better that she said it flat out, without beating around the bush. It goes right into your brain, and finds the place where you were thinking that it might be something like that, even if you hadn’t admitted it to yourself. I guess when a woman reaches eighty-six years old, and you’re spending most of every day with her, you’ve got to at least consider the possibility of what she might be facing. And I realized, as she said the word, cancer, that I’d thought it a few times, but I must have just banished the thought from my mind, like I’d banished the thought of giving her a gun. Edith was so strong, so self-assured, so in control, that I guess I never really thought to look around that particular corner. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. Because, to be perfectly blunt about it, I had come to love Edith in a way that was as important to me as the love I had for my own family. When you love someone like that, a part of your brain just shuts down, the part that doesn’t want to see what it doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want to hear what it doesn’t want to hear.

But now I heard it, standing there in the fluorescent light, and the word hung in the air, in front of me, like I could see it sitting there.

Cancer.

I don’t know how long I was standing there, just letting the thought sink in, but the nurse was patient—I’m sure this wasn’t the first time she’d had to break the news to someone—and she just looked at me, without pity or emotion, just waiting. The first words out of my mouth, after what seemed like forever, were “Does she know yet?”

“Yes, she knows,” she said. “The social worker was in to see her, and explained it all to her.” The nurse gave me a quick rundown of where things stood. Apparently Edith had three choices: Surgery, which was an iffy proposition at best for an eighty-six-year-old woman. It might do some good, but it could certainly do a lot of harm. Radiation and chemo were options, but not great ones, since she probably wasn’t capable of withstanding the treatment. The third choice was to just let the disease run its course. That was the phrase she used—“run its course.” My mind immediately went to the end of that course, but it was a place I couldn’t quite let myself fathom, just yet.

I thanked the nurse and walked down to Edith’s room. She was sharing it with another patient, and the TV was on a little too loud, but I was used to talking to Edith over the sound of the television, so it didn’t seem inappropriate.

I just said, how are you doing, and she just said, fine, and we chatted for a few minutes about nothing, about the details of the day, both of us waiting for the other to raise the subject, I guess.

“So, do you know what’s going on? Did they tell you?” I finally asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, they did,” and she turned away, to look at the television.

She seemed so small in that hospital bed, in that flimsy robe, behind the big metal bars on the bedside. She was holding in her hand the remote that controlled the bed and the TV and called the nurse, and her hand seemed so tiny around that big device. Something about the light of a hospital room makes everything seem a little surreal, like you could close your eyes and open them and be back at home like none of this ever happened. Or maybe you just want it to look like that.

We talked a little bit about the options the nurse had told me about, the chemo and surgery and all, and of course Edith said she didn’t want to do any of those things. I started to argue with her—but then I stopped.

What would she get out of fighting this thing? I know what I would get out of it. I would get the satisfaction of knowing I’d done everything I could for her. But Edith Wilson Macefield, what was in it for her? Certainly not any quality of life. It would take her too long to recover, if she recovered at all. My mind flashed back once again to the conversation we’d had, when I first met her, about the Kingdome. How change didn’t really bother her, because everything changes eventually; the building I was putting up would be torn down, just like they tore down the Kingdome twenty years after they built it. A little fragment of a song from who knows where floated through my head—just a snippet, something about “it’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea.” I looked down at Edith, and as strange as it is to say, she seemed relaxed. Relieved, even.

I couldn’t put my finger on it. I suppose it could have been the drugs they’d given her, but I didn’t think so. It seemed like more than that—that there was something about the day that had changed her in a way I hadn’t expected.

I pulled up the little plastic chair next to her bed, and sat down.

“Did they give you any dinner, Edith?” I asked her.

“Tried to. It was horrible. I’d rather starve than try to eat the slop in this joint.”

Well, I thought, at least Edith is still Edith. I told her I’d go down the hall and see what they had in the machines.

As I went foraging, I felt the weight of the new knowledge settle over me, like I could almost feel its physical presence: cancer. It’s not like I thought Edith was going to live forever, but the reality of this, the simple fact of it, felt like we were on a train that had switched over to a different track. There was no going back. There was only riding this to the end of the line.

The thought reminded me of something a friend of mine used to like to say: Be careful of that light at the end of the tunnel. It might be a train that’s headed right for you. But I thought, That’s not really what Edith’s going through—or what I’m going through. In fact, it’s just the opposite. For a long time, Edith had been in a long, dark tunnel, unable to read, to write, to control her bodily functions, and there was no end in sight and no explanation for it. Now there was a reason for it, a name for it, and that, at least, shed some light into this dark, dark tunnel.

I stopped walking, right in the middle of the hallway, because the thought hit me like someone had thrown a tennis ball at my forehead. This, I realized, was exactly what my father went through when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

I thought about the two of them: Alzheimer’s. Cancer. Not the most pleasant words that can come into your life. But the words themselves have so much meaning, so much weight, and are such double-edged swords. I don’t mean to downplay them in any way, but part of what I was learning, from Edith, day by day, was how to deal with my father and his illness. And part of the lesson, in this moment, in the relaxed look I had seen on Edith’s face, was simply this: that the not-knowing is the worst. I’d heard John Walsh on America’s Most Wanted say that a bunch of times, when he was talking about missing children, but I’d never really understood it until this moment. The not-knowing is the worst. For Edith, the darkness she’d been living in had been lifted. Even though it revealed a horrible, terrible, life-threatening truth, at least she knew, now, what the world held for her. She always needed to know, I realized, what was happening: Was I coming at six or seven? Was I sleeping on her floor tonight or going home? Who was going to take care of her on the weekend that I was out of town? Those, and a thousand other details, were the essentials of her life. It always bugged me when she’d grill me with questions: What time are you coming? What time are we having dinner? What time are you leaving? And I’d think, kind of annoyed, Well, why, are you going somewhere? But really, when I thought about this moment, it made perfect sense. Of course she always needed to know the tiny details of the day—it was her way of feeling at least a little bit in control. And of course she needed to argue about all of them—because that was her way of exerting some of that control.

And so it would make sense for her to feel relaxed, even confident, after finding out she’d gotten The Big C, as paradoxical as it might seem. Because the not-knowing had made this the one part of her life that she had had no control over; but now she was the boss again. Chemo? Radiation? Surgery? If nothing else, she got to make the decisions, the big, big decisions. That is the one thing that diminishes as you get older—and the one thing that those of us who help out need to remember. They’ve spent their lives making enormous decisions about their own destiny, and the destinies of others. If even half of what Edith had told me about her past was true, she had made decisions that affected the very lives of dozens of children. So to be given, one last time, the power over life and death—the power to choose, to decide—must be a very deeply reassuring feeling. More reassuring than life itself, I guess.

There was only junk food in the machines—which always surprises me, in a hospital, a place that’s supposed to be all about making you healthy, that the machines are so filled with crap. And then I laughed at myself again. “Well,” I thought, as I slid in a dollar and pushed the button for some kind of cake-type device, “it’s not like it’s gonna kill her.”